Michael Hudson (economist)

Hudson was born on March 14, 1939 in Chicago, Illinois.[3] Hudson is a fifth generation American as on his maternal line he has Ojibwe blood. His father, Nathaniel Carlos Hudson (1908–2003), received an economics education at Minnesota University. After completing his studies in 1929, the year of the Great Depression, his father joined the trade union struggle, became an active Trotskyist trade unionist, editor of the Northwest Organizer and The Industrial Organizer and wrote articles for other trade union publications. When Hudson was three years old, his father was arrested on Smith Act violation grounds, an act aimed at suppressing Trotskyists in the United States.

Hudson received his primary and secondary education in a private school at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. After his graduation, he entered the University of Chicago with two majors: Germanic philology and history. In 1959, Hudson graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree. After graduation, he worked as an assistant to Jeremy Kaplan at the Free Press in Chicago. He managed to obtain the rights to the English language editions of the works of György Lukács as well as the rights to the archives and works of Leon Trotsky after the death of Trotsky's widow, Natalia Sedova.

Hudson found work at the publishing house neither interesting nor profitable. Hudson, who had studied music from his childhood, moved to New York in 1960 in hopes of becoming a pupil of the conductor Dimitris Mitropoulos, but these plans were not to be realized. In New York, his friend Gavin McFadyen introduced him to the father of his girlfriend, economist Terence McCarthy.[4] At their first meeting, McCarthy regaled Hudson with a vivid description of the interconnection of natural and financial cycles, the nature of money and public debt. This fortuitous encounter motivated Hudson to study economics instead of music, and McCarthy became his mentor. Hudson recalled: "And he described it and it was such a beautiful, aesthetic flow of funds that, believe it or not, I got into economics, because it was beautiful and aesthetic. [...] And Terence, I must have talked to him every day for an hour a day for 30 years".

In 1961, Hudson enrolled in the Economics Department of New York University. His master's thesis was devoted to the development philosophy of the World Bank and special attention was paid to credit policy in the agricultural sector. Many years later, Hudson recognized: "The topics that most interested me ... were not taught at New York University where I took my graduate economics degrees. In fact, they are not taught in any university departments: the dynamics of debt, and how the pattern of bank lending inflates land prices, or national income accounting and the rising share absorbed by rent extraction in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. There was only one way to learn how to analyze these topics: to work for banks."

To find out how finance worked in reality, Hudson, in addition to his university studies, began to work in a bank: "My first job was as mundane as could be imagined: an economist for the Savings Banks Trust Company. No longer existing, it had been created by New York's then-127 savings banks (now also extinct, having been grabbed, privatized and emptied out by commercial bankers). I was hired to write up how savings accrued interest and were recycled into new mortgage loans. My graphs of this savings upsweep looked like Hokusai's Wave, but with a pulse spiking like a cardiogram every three months on the day quarterly dividends were credited."

In 1964, Hudson, who had just received his master's degree in economics, joined Chase Manhattan Bank's economics research department as a balance of payments specialist. His task was to identify the payment capacity of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Based on export earnings and other international payment data, Hudson had to determine the income the bank could derive from the debt that these countries had accumulated. He recalled that, "I soon found that the Latin American countries I analyzed were fully 'loaned up'. There were no more hard currency inflows available to extract as interest on new loans or bond issues. In fact, there was capital flight." Among other tasks that Hudson performed at Chase Manhattan was an analysis of the balance of payments of the US oil industry and the tracking of "dirty" money that ended up in Swiss banks. According to Hudson, this work gave him invaluable experience in understanding how banks and the financial sector work as well as understanding how bank accounting and real life correlate. It was during the study of oil company revenue flows (the study was funded by Chase Manhattan and Socony Oil Company) that Hudson met with Alan Greenspan, (future Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors), who acted as a consultant to Socony Oil. Hudson recalled that Greenspan had already successfully lobbied for the interests of his clients in those years and in the framework of the research tried to provide rough estimates of the US market based on global trends: "Mr. Rockefeller, Chase President, told me to inform Mr. Greenspan that unless he could provide specifically US figures, and/or be forthright about his assumptions, we would have to leave his contribution out of the study.".

Hudson left his job at the bank to complete his doctoral dissertation. His thesis was devoted to US economic and technological thought in the 19th century. It was successfully defended in 1968 and in 1975 it was published under the title Economics and Technology in 19th Century American Thought: The Neglected American Economists.

In 1968, Hudson joined the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, for whom he expanded his analysis of payment flows for all areas of US production. He discovered that the United States deficit was evident only in the military sphere: "My charts revealed that the U.S. payments deficit was entirely military in character throughout the 1960s. The private sector—foreign trade and investment—was exactly in balance, year after year, and "foreign aid" actually produced a dollar surplus (as it was required to do under U.S. law)." However, the accounting system used in the US after the war mixed the balance of individuals and state payments flow into a single balance which concealed the budget deficit. Hudson proposed dividing US balance of payments figures into governmental and private sectors.

In 1968, Hudson published a 100 page brochure titled A financial payments-flow analysis of U.S. international transactions, 1960-1968 in which he pointed out the flaws in the accounting system and the need to distinguish between state deficits and private payments. After the appearance of the brochure, Hudson was invited to speak to the graduate economics faculty of The New School in 1969. As it happened, the New School needed someone to teach international trade and finance. Hudson was offered the job immediately after his lecture. According to Hudson, he was surprised to find that the university program virtually ignored the issues of debt, financial flows, money laundering and the like. The emphasis that Hudson placed on these subjects in his lectures aroused criticism from Economics Department Chairman Robert Heilbroner, who noted that his faculty did not focus on these issues.

In 1972, Hudson published his first major book, Super Imperialism. In it, he showed how Nixon's abandonment of the gold standard created a situation wherein United States Department of the Treasury bonds became the sole basis for global reserves. It left foreign governments with no choice but to finance the US budget deficit and hence its military expenditures. After publication of the book, Hudson left the institute and moved to the Hudson Institute headed by Herman Kahn. In 1979, he became an advisor to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). He wrote reports for the Canadian Ministry of Defense and also acted as a consultant to the Canadian government. His second big book, titled Global Fracture: The New International Economic Order was published in 1977. In it, Hudson argued that the military superiority of the United States led to the division of the world along financial lines.

After a meeting in Mexico where his warning of the debt bondage that the Latin American countries are getting into caused a storm of protests, he left his job at UNITAR and left the field of modern economics. Instead, Hudson studied the historical roots of debt: how debts were formed in ancient Rome, Greece, and Sumer. His historical reconstructions from scattered materials led him to a striking conclusion: that loans in ancient Sumer were issued not only by individuals, but mainly by temples and palaces. Sumerian state creditors were keen to ensure that the equilibrium of the economy was maintained, therefore the state did not allow citizens to fall into debt bondage. In 1984, Hudson joined Harvard's archaeology faculty at the Peabody Museum as a research fellow in Babylonian economics. A decade later, he was a founding member of ISCANEE (International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies), an international group of Assyriologists and archaeologists who analyzed the economic origins of civilization. This group has become the successor to Karl Polanyi's anthropological and historical group of a half-century ago. Four volumes co-edited by Hudson have appeared so far, dealing with privatization, urbanization and land use, the origins of money, accounting, debt and debt jubilees in the ancient Near East. This new research field is now known as new economic archaeology.

In the mid-1990s, Hudson became a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a fellow at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. In the early-2000s, he issued a warning that growing inflation and the upsurge of mortgage debt would lead to a crisis. Much earlier, in the 1980s, Hudson had proposed a book in which he would show that the growth of a mortgage bubble would inevitably lead to a crisis, but publishers demurred. "They told me that this was like telling people that good sex would stop at an early age", Hudson said. In 2004, Hudson wrote several popular articles for Harper's Magazine in which he outlined his analysis of the problem. When the crisis erupted in 2008, the Financial Times named him one of eight economists who foresaw it. Hudson himself argued that the approach of the crisis was seen by everyone except economists from Wall Street.

As of 2020, Hudson is the director of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET) and the Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.[5] He contributes a weekly "Hudson Report" to the Left Out podcast.[6]

Hudson devoted his first works to the problem of the gold and foreign exchange reserves and the US foreign economic debt, a subject that his mentor Terence McCarthy had previously dealt with in detail. In his first article titled "Sieve of Gold", Hudson analyzed the negative economic consequences of the Vietnam War. He drew attention to the fact that, even without war, the US economy very soon came to a critical point as the welfare of the US in the postwar years was in many cases provided with a "golden pillow", which was accumulated for interwar and war years. Since 1934, when frightened by Adolf Hitler, Europeans began to buy US government securities, thereby shifting their gold and foreign exchange reserves to US banks. From 1934, US gold and foreign exchange reserves increased from $7.4 billion to $20.1 billion in 1945. After the creation of the Bretton Woods system, an International Monetary Fund (IMF) was created within the framework as well as a gold pool that guaranteed that the dollar was as good as gold, capital began to leave the country and move to Europe. Military expenditures accounted for a huge share of the United States budget deficit, which tried in vain to prevent further growth in the deficit, on the one hand in every way limiting the flow of gold and on the other hand not allowing foreign central banks to receive gold for the given dollars. Such a policy appealed to European bankers who found such a policy hypocritical, but could not do anything because they were afraid to bring down the dollar and thereby deprive their producers of competitiveness in US markets.

In A Financial Payments-Flow Analysis of U.S. International Transactions, 1960-1968, Hudson showed that US export statistics erroneously included a class of goods whose transfer abroad did not involve payment at any time from residents of one nation to those of another and which are for this reason not really international transactions at all. Primary among this class of goods are the transfers of aircraft parts and components by the United States to international airlines at their overseas air terminals and installation on their aircraft. These transfers were brought into the host country under bond and therefore were excluded from import statistics. At the same time, their value was included in the United States export statistics as a credit, therefore the government sector has been in sizable deficit on a payments-flow basis during 1960–1968, resulting mainly from its military operations, but existing accounting systems that mixed government and private flows did not show the problem and the source of disparities. In his monograph, Hudson made an attempt to divide the United States balance of payments into government and private sectors.

In 1972, Hudson published Super Imperialism, which traced the history of the formation of American imperialism after the end of World War I. In Hudson's interpretation, super-imperialism is a stage of imperialism in which the state does not realize the interests of any group, but it is itself wholly and entirely aimed at imperializing the seizure of other states. Continuing the position outlined in A Financial Payments-Flow Analysis of U.S. International Transactions, 1960-1968, Hudson stressed the aid system formed after the end of World War II was called upon to solve the problem of the economy. All American foreign politics (including tied aid and debts) were aimed at restraining the economic development of Third World countries in those sectors of the economy where the United States was afraid of the emergence of competition. At the same time, the US imposed free trade policies on developing countries, a policy that was the reverse of the one that had led to US prosperity.

After the cancellation of the conversion of dollars into gold, the US forced foreign central banks to buy US treasuries that are used to finance the federal deficit and large military. In exchange for providing a net surplus of assets, commodities, debt financing, goods and services, foreign countries are forced to hold an equal amount of US treasuries. It drives US interest rates down, which drives down the dollar's foreign exchange rate.

Hudson views foreign central banks buying treasuries as a legitimate effort to stabilize exchange rates rather than a currency manipulation. Foreign central banks could sell the excess dollars on the exchange market which would strengthen their currency, but he calls this a dilemma because it decreases their ability to continue a trade surplus even though it would also increase their purchasing power. He believes keyboard credit and treasury outflows in exchange for foreign assets without a future means for the United States to repay the treasuries and a decreasing value of the dollar is akin to military conquest. He believes balance of payments surplus countries have the right to stabilize exchange rates and expect repayment of the resulting loans even as industry shifts from the United States to creditor nations. He states the Washington Consensus has encouraged the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to impose austerity that the United States itself is not exposed to thanks to dollar dominance, which leads to subjecting other countries to unfair trade that depletes natural resources and privatizing infrastructure that is sold at distressed prices that uses parasitic finance techniques (including Western-style tax breaks) to extract the maximum amount of the country's surplus rather than providing a price-competitive service.

At the end of the 1980s, Hudson left the field of modern economics and started exploration of the history of debt. He found that the first and by far the earliest major creditors were the temples and palaces of Bronze Age Mesopotamia, not private individuals acting on their own. The rate of interest in each region was not based on productivity, but was set purely for simplicity of calculation in the local system of fractional arithmetic, i.e., 1/60th per month in Mesopotamia and later 1/10th per year for Greece and 1/12th for Rome.

The stability of the state strongly depended on the number of free and independent people, so the existing restrictions prevented the emergence of personal debt dependence. The proclamations of Clean Slates had the purpose of improving the economy. Hudson stated: "In the early 1990s I had tried to write my own summary, but was unable to convince publishers that the Near Eastern tradition of Biblical debt cancellations was firmly grounded. Two decades ago economic historians and even many Biblical scholars thought that the Jubilee Year was merely a literary creation, a utopian escape from practical reality. I encountered a wall of cognitive dissonance at the thought that the practice was attested to in increasingly detailed Clean Slate proclamations".

According to Hudson, instead of a sanctity of debt, what was sacred in the ancient Near East was the regular cancellation of agrarian debts and freeing of bondservants as well as freedmen from permanent debt servitude in order to preserve social balance, and to ensure a sturdy agrarian class of freedmen to serve in the army. This was one of the primary goals of Hammurabi's famous law code (c. 1729-1686 b.c.).[7] Such amnesties were not destabilizing, but were essential to preserving social and economic stability.

From the beginning of 2000s, Hudson pays special attention to the issues of inflating fictitious capital, which entails the withdrawal of funds from the real economy and leads to debt deflation. He states finance has been key to guiding politics into reducing the productive capacity of the United States and Europe even as they benefit from finance methods using similar and expanded techniques to harm Chile, Russia, Latvia and Hungary. Hudson states parasitic finance looks at industry and labor to determine how much wealth it can extract by fees, interest and tax breaks, rather than providing needed capital to increase production and efficiency. He states the magic of compounding interest results in increasing debt that eventually extracts more wealth than production and labor are able to pay. Rather than extracting taxes from the rentiers to reduce the cost of labor and assets and use the tax revenue to improve infrastructure to increase production efficiency, he states the United States tax system, bank bailouts and quantitative easing sacrifice labor and industry for the benefit of the finance sector. According to Hudson, bankers and rentiers as early as 1880s started to search ways to rationalize untaxing and deregulating finance, real estate and monopolies. They succeed in the 1980s with establishing a neoliberal Washington consensus that states "everyone is worth what they get" so there is no "unearned increment" to be untaxed.

Hudson stresses that world victory of neoliberal politics is closely connected with its educational support in all big universities. He argues it is telling that one of the first acts of the Chicago Boys in Chile after the military junta overthrew the Allende government in 1973 was to close down every economics department in the nation outside of the Catholic University, a University of Chicago monetarist stronghold. The junta then closed down every social science department and fired, exiled or murdered critics of its ideology in the terrorist Project Condor program waged throughout Latin America and spread to political assassination in the United States itself. What the Chicago Boys recognized is that free market ideology requires totalitarian control of the school and university system, totalitarian control of the press and control of the police where intellectual resistance survives against the idea that economic planning should become much more centralized, but moved out of the hands of government into those of the bankers and other financial institutions, stating: "Free market ideology ends up as political Doublethink in countering any freedom of thought. Its remarkable success in the United States and elsewhere thus has been achieved largely by excluding the history of economic thought – and of economic history – from the economics curriculum".

Hudson identifies himself as a Marxist economist, but his interpretation of Karl Marx is different from most other Marxists. Whilst other Marxists emphasize the contradiction of wage labor and capital as the core issue of today capitalist world, Hudson rejects that idea and believes parasitic forms of finance have warped the political economy of modern capitalism. Hudson points to Marx's view of capitalism as the historic force that tends to eliminate all forms of pre-capitalist rent seeking, i.e. land rent, monopoly rent and financial rent (usury). The original meaning of a free market as discussed by classical political economists was a market free from all forms of rent. The gist of classical political economy was to distinguish earned and unearned income (also known as rent or free lunch). He then argues that unlike Marx's optimistic expectation history did not go in that direction and today modern capitalism is dominated by rentier classes. The concept of the proletariat as a class for itself presupposes a rent-free society, saying that "wages have been going no where recently, I hope you've been making a killing on your house price!". The other form of rent is imperialist rent, flowing from underdeveloped countries to developed ones. All of these forces distort the political economy of the modern capitalism, pushing labour-capital contradiction to the background and bringing other issues to the foreground. This is as if instead of progress, history has regressed back to a neo-feudal system.

Although Hudson's views are unpopular amongst other Marxists and sometimes vehemently rejected by them, his views converge with later writings of Marx himself. Hudson points out that most Marxists never go beyond Capital, Volume I, where Marx assumes there is a rent-free market where all commodities are sold at their values. That is how Marx deduces the exploitative nature of capitalism and labour-capital dichotomy as its underlying contradiction, but in Capital, Volume II and Capital, Volume III he relaxes his assumptions and discovers other contradictions that are much closer to what can be observed in today's economic system. In Capital, Volume III, Marx discusses the tendency of productivity and supply to increase at a faster pace than the consumption power and demand. Marx also revised his earlier ideas as he studied and learned more about the asymmetric development of capitalism. This ultimately led him to soften his revolutionary tone as he realized how dominance of an industrially advanced nations over underdeveloped nations and blocks revolutionary tendencies amongst working classes of dominating nations. On the other side, Marx clashed with Karl Schapper, suggesting that the idea of workers taking over the state power ends up in disaster because they are not ready to practice that power.